Best Hardware Config for FMS9 on Mac?

[Geeksharka]

Hi all,

One of my clients wants to move up from the Mac Mini they're using as a dedicated FMS box.

My question is, which is the best Mac machine they can buy to boost their server's speed?

Specifically, will FMS benefit from two chips as opposed to just one? We are planning to purchase the Mac Pro tower, with two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon chips. Just want to know if buying the two-chip setup is indeed significantly better than just getting the one chip -- and upping the RAM instead.

All ideas, advice, vastly appreciated.

[mr_vodka]

Make sure you get a good and fast hard drive. FMS is very taxing on the hard drive. What amount of RAM are you looking at?

[Geeksharka]

Probably 4GB, or 8GB if needed.

I will focus on the drive too.

Do you know if FMS takes advantage of dual processors?

[mr_vodka]

4GB is all that is can handle. As for dual processor, I would get is just for other processes for the OS. FMS I dont believe takes advantage of the second processor "effectively".

You may want to get a decent NIC card as well as the hard drive.

My suggestions would be in order of:

1. Quality Fast Hard Drive

2. NIC

3. Memory

4. Additional Processor.

[Geeksharka]

Perfect -- looks like I was going the right direction then.

I very much appreciate it.

Cheers,

[Steven H. Blackwell]

And the drives that come in that tower are not good enough. You need either UW SCSI or Serially Attached SCSI drives if you're serious about your server.

Steven

[Johhhn]

Are you saying FMS can only use 4Gigs? or the Mac Pro? the Mac Pro can use up to 32Gigs of RAM.

As far as the server and what to get:

I'd recommend minimum Dual G5 PowerMac.

4 Gigs of RAM.

RAID 0 + 1 for the Boot/Data location.

Then another drive for a clone of the boot drive.

And one more drive to backup (versioning) the backups of your backups.

[mr_vodka]

Yes.

[Geeksharka]

Thanks for the heads up on the tower drives -- will look for SCSI alternatives.

Already have an external for scheduled backups.

Main concern is speed — also optimizing scripts, layouts, etc as we move forward, but the sheer bulk of data will also benefit from faster drives as the constant I/O is significant.

I have some speed recording scripts for benchmarking -- will be interesting to see how the new system compares to the Mac Mini it's on now. :

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Are you saying FMS can only use 4Gigs? or the Mac Pro? the Mac Pro can use up to 32Gigs of RAM.

32 GB is probably a waste of RAM. Spend the money on drives. The maximum amount of RAM that can--and should--be reserved for cache for FMS is 800 MB. That requires 4 GB installed RAM.

FMSis a 32 bit daemon/service. It, in and of itself, can use only 2 GB RAM. The remainder is used for OS, and possibly the Web Services. If you are doing a lot of web you might profit from having 8 GB installed RAM if you are using the all in one configuration for FMS.

HTH

Steven

[IdealData]

Considered an Xserve with SAS drives??

If your client is upping from Mac Mini then any of the other Mac kit will be a massive improvement, but I doubt they'll ever use all the power.

Incidentally, Xserve ships with dual 1Gbps ethernet - another nice feature.

[Geeksharka]

We were actually considering the Power Mac with SAS drive.

Right now this is the config we're leaning towards:

Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)

4GB (4 x 1GB)

Mac Pro RAID Card

300GB 15,000-rpm SAS

As stated though -- either way, it will be a HUGE step up from the small Mac Mini they've got now.

[mr_vodka]

Sounds pretty good to me. :